If you keep up with any of the recipes on these pages, then you’ll know brown butter is placed on a very high pedestal in my kitchen life. In fact, I’d say it is one of the first cooking techniques, and arguably one of the easiest, every cook and baker alike should know. There are a variety of ways to go about browning butter (i.e. butter pieces vs. sticks of butter, skillet vs. sauce pan, swirling vs. whisking) and really any of them will get your butter a deep, nutty, golden amber brown eliminating the guess work behind which method to approach. I’ve browned butter every which way, but this way, the way below, is my favorite.

Start by cutting your butter roughly into tablespoon sized amounts (I find it melts more quickly and more evenly than leaving the sticks whole, though both ways work just fine), place the pieces in a skillet (it has more surface area than a saucepan, thus equaling more browned bits) and place the skillet over medium heat. There is no need to use a non-stick skillet. Actually, if you have a stick-skillet or a pot without a dark coating it will be easier to see when your butter browns which is important since there is such a short amount of time between brown butter and burnt butter.

Melt the butter and let it cook. There will be a lot of gurgling and popping, sputtering and crackling and foaming too. This is all ok. In fact it’s good. The butter is getting ready to do its brown thing.

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I’m just gonna say it, pomegranates are weird. They’re odd looking, have seeds instead of juicy flesh and most of them look like they’ve been dropped one too many times. That being said, they are delicious. Their little ruby red seeds burst in your mouth with a punch of flavor, and luckily are easy to crack into despite their daunting appearance.

To get started find the bottom of the pomegranate. It will be the side with the knobby protrusion. Using a chef’s knife slice off just the very tip of the pomegranate being careful to not cut into the seeds.

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If you are like me, then you tend to bring home baskets full of produce when the two of you can only eat an armful at most. But it’s so pretty! It’s red and shiny! This entire bushel is flawless, we must buy! It smells so good, I can’t leave without 3 pounds! Perhaps you have said this too? Convincing yourself your better half that the 5 different varieties of tomatoes were absolutely necessary, and that you could not survive without them. Yes, that is where I live in summer. The farmer’s market, the produce section at Whole Foods, the produce stands on the side of rural roads. Just smelling the sweet earthiness of produce sends me into a tizzy sometimes, and well, when your budget is suddenly threatened because, hey, I decided we needed $50 worth of cherries today means you may find yourself on the other end of a harsh look, or disapproving head shake from the man taking care of the bills.

Even with the constant whining explanations of we only get this for 3 months, and then nothing! Just boring squash and collards and dried out peppers until next summer, we must eat now! doesn’t mean he will actually then applaud you for bringing home the overwhelming bounty you seem to haul in every week. So, in order to make it more cost effective, to make the summer’s best stay with us until next summer, and so we don’t get produce lust every June because we have been without it for far too long, we freeze. We freeze our produce booty and eat it all year long until next summer, when we can stock up a little more, without over killing it because hey, I’ve had great blackberries during February so it’s not as much of a shock when I see their delicious black beaded balls sitting in front of me in June.

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I must admit, for being all “organic/local/don’t buy anything store bought” I never had any problems throwing a container of stock in my cart. It was easy and fast and, really, can you actually taste a difference? Well, after a recent endeavor to be more thrifty in the kitchen I couldn’t bare to think of wasting a perfectly good chicken carcass on the trash — which means raccoons and all sorts of nightly creatures in my part of town. So, I made stock, and I must confess, I have been planted back on the path of “everything should be homemade” — it does make a difference.

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Because I like doing this the hard way, because I am not satisfied with the canned pureed pumpkins, and because I’m me, I decided to make pumpkin puree. It was a long, arduous journey going from small cutesy pumpkin to pureed mash, my hands screaming in agony from chopping and slicing virtually impenetrable walls of pumpkin. The thought of how long the canned variety sits on the super market’s shelf every year waiting for Thanksgiving season to bring in hoards of grabby pumpkin mongers to descend upon it’s easy, simple, uncomplicated addition to recipes was alarming. Can you really justify the purchase of years old pumpkin puree when you can bring home bag-fulls of pumpkins for next to nothing? One batch of fresh puree was all it took to help me realize, those cans are a life-saver. It took an incredible amount of strength and time to make this, but for those like me here are the steps to your own battle with the gourd:

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